Meet Tim Scott, South Carolina's New Kingmaker

[#image: /photos/5582fbee3655c24c6c954ce4]||||||Winter recess for members of Congress is a relatively sleepy time, when mobile offices, local business meet-and-greets and interminable constituent meetings are punctuated by a few afternoons of downtime spent with family.

Not so for Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina. "I’m taping Erin Burnett’s show tomorrow, I’m doing John King tonight," he said Friday.

As the Palmetto state’s primary draws nearer, the freshman lawmaker, one of the first black Republicans elected to Congress from the Deep South since Reconstruction, will be a near ubiquitous presence on the Republican stage. On Saturday night, he and Mike Huckabee will host a forum with the GOP hopefuls on the former evangelical candidate’s Fox News show. He’ll appear on "Meet the Press Sunday" and will ask the candidates questions at the two nationally televised debates held in the state next week.

When he’s not on television or participating in candidate forums, the Congressman is having long talks with friends, advisors and colleagues about whether or not to endorse in the GOP primary. "I am starting the process of elimination. I am closer to the decision, but I have not come to the decision yet," he said.

After Senator Jim DeMint, who remains the conservative movement’s leading luminary, there’s no endorsement the candidates covet more in South Carolina than Scott’s, a gifted politician who carries himself with seemingly preternatural comfort through the upper echelons of House GOP leadership (where he serves as a liaison for the historically large and occasionally rebellious freshman class) and the pressure cooker of the state’s political scene (where Tea Party activists keep a close eye on how often he votes with them.)

Scott brushes off the importance of being one of the first two black Republicans in the class (the other is Florida’s Allen West, an occasionally unhinged bombast who draws a lot more press attention but hasn’t as deftly maneuvered the insider game in Washington.) But race-or rather, the way he talks about race-is undoubtedly a part of his appeal.

He was raised in an impoverished, mostly black neighborhood by a single mother who took breaks from her 16-hour-a-day shifts as a nurse’s assistant to drive home and make sure he and his brother were behaving. But he rebelled in middle and early high school, failing a number of classes, until he met an evangelical manager at a local Chick-fil-A who took him under his wing. Scott credits him for sparking his interest in business, which in turn led him to run for county council.

"At the end of the day, it’s what you do that matters to my voters, not what you look like. I’ve seen the ugliness that comes with a racially divisive world, but I’ve experienced very consistently that if you represent what you are more than what you look like, people respond to it," he once told me. It almost sounds...well, post-racial. Except that it never really can be. Republicans in the state love the historic nature of his ascendance, what it might say both about the future of the conservative movement and about the ugly history of race and the GOP there; they love even more that Scott dismisses it like it isn’t that big of a deal.

In the past several months, Scott’s established himself as an heir apparent to DeMint as the state’s kingmaker, organizing what he calls "Tim’s town halls"--forums for the presidential candidates to meet with his constituents and likely GOP voters in the state’s must win primary. He has local GOP groups and Tea Party organizations co-host-an attempt, he says, to unite the establishment and the activist groups in the interest of picking the best nominee. The town hall series proved a brilliant move for the rookie lawmaker; nearly every candidate (save Ron Paul, who’s been hard to pin down) jumped at the chance to appear with Scott over the last several months. They’ve discovered that he’s wildly popular in the state. When I went do to a story on Scott’s efforts this summer, more than one of the elected officials I spoke to said that, in the Charleston and Myrtle Beach counties that Scott represents, his approval ratings are likely higher than DeMint’s.

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Elected Republicans in South Carolina face some of the most intense scrutiny anywhere in the country. Everyone watches what DeMint does. And so far, DeMint seems happy to stay in the category of people who don’t explicitly endorse Romney but clearly want him to win.

"I know you’ve been reading the comments of Senator DeMint, obviously," Scott said when I noted that some in his state seemed happy to give everything but an explicit endorsement. "I will say that there’s no bigger endorsement that anyone wants than Jim DeMint ... he believes, as I do, that if Governor Romney wins South Carolina it’s more or less over." And he said Romney does appear to be headed for a win.

An endorsement would help solidify his status as the state’s next kingmaker. But the risks of infuriating the Tea Party are tremendous; if Romney is inevitable, Scott might not need to stick his neck out anyway. "I’m co-hosting the candidates, and we want to remain neutral until we’re done," is all he’ll say for now.

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